GROUP ASSIGNMENTChanging people’s mind toward homosexuality

and same-sex marriage

                  

 

1.Steve Yacinthe

2. Lưu Xuân Khương

3.Tina  Tran

4. Lê Hà Class: IBA 0801

Subject: Consumer behavior

Table of Contents

I.                  Introduction.....................................3

II.               Campaign introduction..............................4

III.           Activities............................................4

IV.           Theory and issues......................................6

V.              Criticize  theory...................................10Conclusion/Recommendation..........................................11

VI. References......................................................12

I.                  Introduction    Everyone have the rights to be happy with their other

half/soulmate, no matter if they are same-sex or not. Maybe it

wasn’t acceptable or normal for a century ago, but in 2014 people

are more civilized and we should learn to accept that everyone

are not the same, and don’t have same preferences.      

The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is a non-profit

organization whom defending freedom. It was established in 1920

by a small group that wanted to stop “crime” against civil

liberties. Since 1920 ACLU have fought for countless cases that

discriminate civil liberties and, today ACLU is the nation’s

premier defender of the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution

and with more than 500,000 members. The ACLU works to extend

rights to segments that have traditionally been denied their

rights, such as people of color; women; lesbians, gay men,

bisexuals and transgender people (LGBT); prisoners; and people

with disabilities (ACLU history 2014).

One of their mission is to defend LGBT rights, so they get same

rights as other people and everyone can fully participate in

civil society.

    ACLU had a campaign called “My Big Gay (Il)legal Wedding, the

campaign was about couples (same-sex) that want to get married.

They told their stories, situation and supporters voted for them,

and the winners got $5000 to prepare for theirs wedding-dream.

The aim of this campaign was to raise awareness regarding

inequality in states where same-sex marriage is not legal yet.   

(LGBT: lesbian gay bisexual transgender)

II.               Campaign introduction.

        The aim of our assignment is to find out FPT employees

and FPT students attitude about LG (lesbian and gay) marriage and

how we can change their attitudes. We’ll use attitudes and

persuasion as an attempt to create positive attitude or to change

FPT’s employees and students attitude towards marriages of LG.

The reason why we chose this theory, is because we think almost

everyone already have an attitude to this topic and ACLU can see

if it possibly to change people's attitude about LG marriages

with the attitudes theories. Although ACLU basically are

defending human rights in America, and 19 states already accept

LG marriages, individual states still have anti-gay and anti-

marriage laws (ACLU, Out for freedom 2014). Vietnamese (in this

case FPT employees and students) are more conservative, so they

might help to understand conservatives states way of thinking

about this topic, and maybe it can help change the conservative

states attitude about it.

To persuade people about same-sex marriage, we started a Facebook

page, where people can read articles about LG, and to examine if

we could change people’s attitudes towards same-sex marriage, we

made an online survey.

Last in the assignment we’ll find out if the theories can be used

to change people’s attitude.

III.           Activities    We’d like not only to provide information about LG, but also

let people understand more about LG.

Our target audience is as many people in Vietnam as possible,

especially people who still keep in their mind the idea that

homosexuality or same-sex marriage is something that goes against

morality.

For running the campaign we run the campaign in 2 main forms:

online and offline.

We run this campaign to help people understand more about the LG

as well as change people’s mind and attitudes toward issue of

marriage for same-sex couples.

We also run campaign to support the LG that “Love and LG marriage

SHOULD BE SOCIAL AND LEGAL RECOGNITION"

For online: we create the fan page on facebook whose name “ĐÁM

CƯỚI ĐỒNG GIỚI” (https://www.facebook.com/damcuoidonggioi?

fref=ts) . This is the page to persuade people support for LG

Love and marriage to have SOCIAL AND LEGAL RECOGNITION. We tried

to use consistency to influence people. On the fan page we keep

updating some information about the love and LG marriage all over

the world to prove that love and LG marriage isn’t immoral and we

need to help people in LG have the recognition from society and

government. We use the theory of consistency to persuade people’s

toward the issue by updating information which relevant to others

to make people pay attention on our idea about love and LG

marriage.

After days since we run the campaign, we had 135 people like our

fan page and the people see the posts which we update everyday

grew up over time.

For offline activities, we have interviewed some people who study

and work in FPT at HoaLac Campus about the homosexuality or same-

sex marriage. This is the chance to catch other opinion and

attitude who are our target audience toward the issue. From their

idea we were able to think about a way to change people's

attitude toward the issue and maybe convince them to accept

homosexuality or same-sex marriage. Based on the interview we

create an online survey to understand FPT students opinion toward

homosexuality or same-sex marriage.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1M4js4scGyDLn4EQpcAE0tGed9ZfU-

U7X6uMIhyP6m5o/viewform.

In our survey we tried to use psychological principles, an

example is consensus. We put a quotation from what Obama said

about LG. This is the theory of using the action of others

(social proof) to influence people. In this case we use the

statement of Obama ( US president) about LGBT rights: “Our journey

is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the

law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another

must be equal as well” (Lucy Madison, 2013)  to let people have an

open-minded about love and LGBT marriage. Because of the fact

that this is a statement of a famous politician in the world, and

he see love and LGBT marriage as a right for people to show their

own love. And his idea can impact people mind and change

perception about homosexuality or same-sex.

This is rating from people on survey online whom agree with the

homosexuality or same-sex marriage:

Yes No

Liking 45 59

Reciprocity 11

Authority 4

Scarcity 4

Consistency 20

Consensus 10

104 people answered our questions, 45 supported same-sex

marriage, while 59 people didn’t support same-sex marriage. After

we asked some questions based on psychological principles with

the purpose to change people’s attitudes, 20 person was

consistency, and we couldn’t persuade them.

During the time we run the campaign, there were a lot of people

support for our campaign because of the fact that they think LG

need to be treated equally. However, there were some people still

keep their own point of view about homosexuality or same-sex

marriage that it’s immoral to accept LG marriage.

In our opinion, that is a start of an attempt to change people’s

attitude toward a social issue.

IV.           Theory and issuesAn attitude in marketing terms is defined as a general evaluation

of a product or service formed over time (Solomon, 2008). An

attitude satisfies a personal motive—and at the same time,

affects the shopping and buying habits of consumers. Dr. Lars

Perner (2010) defines consumer attitude simply as a composite of

a consumer’s beliefs, feelings, and behavioral intentions toward

some object within the context of marketing. A consumer can hold

negative or positive beliefs or feelings toward a product or

service. A behavioral intention is defined by the consumer’s

belief or feeling with respect to the product or service.

Attitude is a lasting, general evaluation of people, objects,

adverts or issues. It is lasting because, it tends to last over

time. people use attitude in many different contexts. Anything

towards which one has an attitude is called attitude object (Ao).

Attitudes operate like schemas to organize information and guide

behavior. Our group is focused on changing the attitudes of

people towards LG marriages. The question many marketers ask

themselves is, how can they change consumer attitude? The

question my group ask is, how can we change people's attitude

towards LG marriages? To answer this question, we first need to

understand about the functional theories of attitudes developed

by the psychologist Daniel Katz. The functional theories of

attitude is used to explain how attitude facilitate social

behavior. Many people who are in this group tend to face social

stigma and they resort sometimes to drastic measures to avoid

their perpetrators. For instance, some people commit suicide

because they are being laughed at or being refused certain

privileges that the non gay community have. Daniel Katz

functional theories of attitude can be illustrated below;

The question you ask yourself after looking at this figure is,

how can this theory help us change someone’s attitude? The

reasons why many of us change or hold on to attitudes are often

found in the functions they perform for us especially the

functions of ego-defence, value-expressive, and knowledge. The

condition necessary to change or modify an attitude depends

greatly on the motivational aspect of that attitude. Take for

instance the ego-defence attitude, people with this type of

attitudes can be changed easily by removal of threats or self

insight. The LG community are sometimes victims of social stigma

just out of fear of them but if this fear or threat is removed,

the way we see the LG community will change and so will our

attitude too. People associated with the expressive function can

be changed simply by changing their beliefs. In many cultures, it

is belief that the LG community should not be granted post of

responsibility and should be banned from taking part of major

events. Some are prosecuted and imprisoned. But studies has

proven that many of those in this community are highly

intellectual persons and are fit for posts of responsibility and

so on. The Daniel Katz Functional Theory of Attitude is important

to understand how we can possibly change people's attitudes

towards a more equal society where everyone is free to love the

person he/she likes, regardless of gender.

Another important theory that can help us change the attitude of

people towards same sex marriage is the ABC MODEL OF ATTITUDE.

This theory is made up of 3components; affect, behavior and

cognition. This accentuates the relationships between knowing,

feeling, and doing. Affect is the feeling an individual has

towards an object. In our content, affect is the feelings

individual have vis-a-vis same sex marriage. Behavior is the

intentions to take actions about it. In other words, it is the

responses of an individual resulting from affect and cognition.

Cognition is what an individual  believes to be true about an

attitude object. An important fact about the ABC model of

attitude is, we cannot determine a consumer’s attitude towards a

product if we just identify their cognitions about it. What we

(the group) focus on is how can the ABC model be used to alter

people’s attitudes towards same sex or LG marriages. If we need

to change people’s attitudes towards LG marriages, we need to

change their affect, behavior, and cognitions (beliefs). It’s a

holy grail for marketers to change consumers attitudes towards a

product, service, or a brand.

When a marketer needs to change the attitude of consumer based on

the factor affect, the marketer can use classical conditioning.

This is most suitable. The  marketer pairs a liked stimulus with

a product. The association creates (positively) a chance to alter

the attitude of a consumer without altering his cognitions. With

regards to our case, in order to alter people's attitudes towards

same sex marriage we intend to associate the word same sex

marriage with a stimulus that will facilitate in changing the

attitudes of people's vis-a-vis same sex marriage. With regards

to behavior, marketers can alter consumers attitude by either

changing the position and price of a product through coupons and

incentives. All this with the aim to promote sales. Changing

behavior is the most difficult amongst all because, beliefs are

sometime inbuilt from the time we are born till our deaths. So

for marketers to alter behavior they came up with 4 strategies if

I may say; changing the current held beliefs about a product,

changing the importance of beliefs, add beliefs, and change

ideals. Putting these ideas in rapport with our case study, we

can say that to change attitudes of people's towards same sex we

need to innovate their attitudes towards same sex marriage,

change the importance of beliefs held in the past and now. We can

even add our own beliefs, for example, gay couple make the best

parents in the world. Finally, we make the same sex marriage and

ideal (a standard of perfection or excellence)

V.              Criticize  theory   We know from the Consumer Behavior (Solomon 2008)  that there are

six way to change people's attitudes; reciprocity, scarcity,

authority, consistency, liking and consensus. In our survey we

tried to ask questions appealing to the psychological principles

to see how we can make them change their attitudes about same-sex

marriage. From our results it seems like authority has the

biggest influence to change people’s mind, but beyond these 6

methods, there are many more factors that affects people’s

attitudes and the psychological principles alone can’t really be

use to change people’s attitudes towards this big object.

Changing attitude towards such a big object as same-sex marriage

will take time. Most people are grown and raise with the way of

thinking, that a wedding need a bride (female) and a groom

(male). To change their attitudes take time and can’t be done in

just a few weeks, it need much more effort.

    Dolores Albarracín, Blair T. Johnson and Mark P. Zanna mean

that social influence has a great influence in changing

attitudes. Minority have more tendency to change their attitudes

about something than majorities (The Handbook of Attitudes 2014,

p. 357). This may be because people are more afraid to have a

different opinion or view on issues, having the same attitude as

the majority is safest. This could also be a reason to why people

won’t accept same-sex marriage, because the majority still don’t

agree about this.

Another remarkable thing is that they mean that there may exist

more than one attitude toward the same objects, it is written in

the book that; “All cognitions can be subject to mental control” (The Handbook

of Attitudes 2014, p. 359), that also mean that we can not be sure

about if we changed people’s attitudes towards same-sex marriage

or not even though they told us. We might change their opinion

for a while, but; “... Once the interaction is over and the social pressure is

removed, however when the individual is alone in looking at and judging the property

of the object, he sees and judges it as he did before, as it is.” (The Handbook of

Attitudes 2014, p. 356).

    Regarding same sex marriage, people's tend to look at love

and the religious teachings associated with love. In most

religions if not all, same sex marriage is a taboo and religion

is in favor of man and woman marriage. Same sex marriage is also

considered immoral. Some people's think its moral to accept same

sex marriage saying that marriage is out of love. Many people's

still tend to believe that true love should only be for a man and

a woman, not only one sex love. Those not in favor of same sex

claim that if the government doesn’t bans same sex marriage, it

might alter other individuals into gay or lesbian and this will

eventually turn the society into an immoral one. After analyzing

this, we come to the conclusion that there can be 2 groups of ABC

model of attitudes.

The first group is the group that recognizes same sex marriage

and embraces everything that goes with it. While the other group

is the group that rejects everything about same sex marriage.

After we did the survey, we found out that many people's were not

in favor of the LG marriage, so we run a campaign to influence

people and persuade them change their mind and attitude toward

love and LGBT marriage based on the theory which refer to chapter

7 of the textbook.

Conclusion/RecommendationOur attempts to alter people's attitude towards same sex marriage

wasn’t quite a success as we expected it to be due to many

inconveniences; lack of accurate data, people’s refusal to take

part in our survey ( some people's didn’t feel as to talk about

it), and time. Nonetheless, we have been able to convince some

individuals regarding the good behind same sex marriage.

Our recommendation goes to the ACLU organization and to everybody

reading this.

The Organization should continue promoting freedom and liberty.

Freedom implies, free to love anyone from any sex. The gay and

lesbian aren’t granted many civil rights in many countries of the

world and this is what our chosen organization is fighting

against.

We recommend ACLU changes the attitude of people's regarding same

sex marriage by changing the meaning of marriage. That is to say,

they should create a new meaning for marriage. For example, take

a look at this video in the link; http://gawker.com/5885060/this-

italian-gay-wedding-video-will-make-you-believe-in-romance . This

video clearly illustrate that love is for all and banning us from

loving people's of any gender is going against the fundamental

rights of freedom. Also, the video clearly illustrates the

essence of marriage; the proposal, wedding ceremony and so on.

VI. References

- ACLU History 2014,

https://www.aclu.org/aclu-history

- ACLU, Out for freedom 2014

https://www.aclu.org/out-freedom

- Albarracín D., Johnson T. Blair, Zanna P. Mark. The Handbook

of Attitudes (2014). Psychology Press.

- Je vais vous marier '': Arcigay pour la Saint Valentin (“I

will marry you”; Arcigay for valentine’s day) (Mark Pâques)

February 13, 2012.

http://video.repubblica.it/cronaca/ti-sposero-l-arcigay-per-san-

valentino/87968/86361

- Madison Lucy: Obama: "Today we continue a never-ending

journey" (2013).

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-today-we-continue-a-never-

ending-journey/

- Perner, L. (2010). Consumer behavior: the psychology of

marketing.October 2, 2010, from

http://www.consumerpsychologist.com/

- Smith, J., Terry, D., Manstead, A., Louis, W., Kotterman,

D., & Wolfs, J. (2008). The Attitude-Behavior Relationship

in Consumer Conduct: The Role of Norms, Past Behavior, and

Self-Identity. The Journal of Social Psychology, 148(3),

311-33.  Retrieved October 4, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global.

(Document ID: 1501929231).

- The American Association for Public Opinion Research, 2014

http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/2/163.abstract

- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language,

Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company